She and Andi had always gotten along well enough, once Sorrow had gotten used to the loud, chatty, know-it-all older girl who had crashed into her life after she moved to Florida. Dad and Sonia had only been dating when Sorrow first went to live with him, but somehow their fledgling relationship had survived the unexpected arrival of a grief-stricken little girl, and before long Sonia’s family had welcomed Sorrow as one of their own. When she was feeling generous, she was grateful for that, how easily they had accepted a weird, quiet girl who was prone to disappearing into the backyard to hide under shrubs for hours on end.
When she wasn’t feeling quite so generous, she wondered if it had been so easy for them because her arrival had been barely a blip in their lives, if the worst thing that had ever happened to her—something so huge and so terrible it had cracked her world right down the middle, opening a chasm she still didn’t know how to bridge—had been nothing more than a minor adjustment for them.
She wasn’t feeling particularly generous today. There was too much wriggling around in her mind already. Cassie’s accusation and Verity’s story and, most of all, her memories of Patience, those small rough gems offering proof that she had been right, that coming back here was the best way to remember, but she couldn’t make sense of them yet. She needed more. She needed to hoard and polish and study every new memory, turn them over in her mind until the shape of what was missing made more sense. Talking to Andi wasn’t going to help her do that. But she made the call anyway.
Andi answered right away. “Hey.”
“Hey. I got your texts.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, do I know you? This number belongs to somebody I used to know, but I haven’t heard from her in a million years.”
Sorrow was regretting the call already. “Very funny.”
“Yeah, no, not really,” Andi said. “I was beginning to think you’d been eaten by a bear.”
“I was at work last night,” Sorrow said.
“How can you have work? You’re only there for a month.” There was noise in the background on Andi’s side of the call—a busy street, chattering voices—but Sorrow couldn’t picture what kind of restaurant she might be in or what street she was walking down.
“I’m helping some neighbors at their store. Just a couple of shifts a week.”
“So you’re not actually that busy,” Andi said.
Sorrow bristled. “This is a farm. I’m busy all the time.”
“What, are they making you do manual labor?”
“Nobody’s making me do anything.” Sorrow closed her eyes. She was not going to let Andi under her skin. “What did you want?”
“Wow. Okay. So we’re gonna be like that.”
“No, I—” Sorrow let out a huff of breath. “I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant—it sounded urgent?”
“But not urgent enough for you to answer right away.”
Sorrow had been assuming that Andi was just being Andi, overly dramatic and self-centered. A year ago Sorrow would have known, but it was different now. Andi lived across the country, Dad and Sonia were barely tolerating each other, and everybody was expecting Sorrow to have some kind of breakdown before their eyes. Now, for the first time, she felt a genuine nudge of worry. “Did something happen?”
“How the hell am I supposed to know?” Andi answered. “That’s what I want to ask you! What’s going on at home?”
Sorrow’s worry vanished like a burst bubble. “You want me to tell you what’s going on at home.”
“Well, Mom isn’t telling me anything. She just keeps saying everything is fine, like she always does, but we know that’s bullshit.”
“You want me to tell you what’s going on at home,” Sorrow said again. “You mean the home that’s like two thousand miles away from me.”
“Yeah, but you were there last—”
“The home that you’re so worried about you decided not to come back even for a visit this summer.”
“I have work,” Andi snapped. “It’s important. I didn’t just decide to go off and play in the woods for the summer.”
“I’m with my family,” Sorrow answered. “I know that’s not important to you, but you could at least pretend it matters.”
She didn’t remember sliding down from the fence, but she was standing in the grass now, and her hands were trembling. She hadn’t wanted to bring any of this with her to Vermont. She already felt like she was being split in half across miles and years, tugged both ways by families that would never understand each other. But Andi didn’t care about any of that. She had never even asked why Sorrow was coming back to Vermont.
“You’re not being fair,” Andi said. She was always first to break the silence.
“I’m not being fair?”
“You were supposed to keep an eye on them.”
“They’re adults,” Sorrow said. “What the hell could I do? They don’t need a babysitter.”
“Well, that’s good, since you’re not doing it anyway.”
“You’re just as far away.”
“You can’t expect me to drop everything in my entire life.”
“But it’s okay to expect me to do that.”
“I expected you to at least make an effort,” Andi said, exasperated.
“Right. I have to do it. Because what you’re doing is important, but all I’m doing is playing in the woods.”
“Yes! No! I don’t know! I thought maybe you would try, since you’re the whole reason they’re—”
Andi broke off suddenly. Sorrow felt numb all over, numb and empty and too light, as though she would float away if she let herself.
“I’m the reason they’re fighting,” Sorrow said. “You can go ahead and say it.”
“I don’t mean—”
“Yes, you do. But it doesn’t matter. They don’t tell me anything. Not even when it’s all my fault.”
“Have you even asked?” Andi demanded. “Or did you just decide to fuck off to Vermont for the summer with no explanation and who cares what the rest of us think?”
“I’m not—”
“I don’t care,” Andi said. “I don’t care! I don’t know if you did something or your dad did something or you’re just both being selfish assholes, but I don’t care about your stupid reasons. I just hope you fucking fix it when you get around to it. I’ve got work to do.”
Andi hung up.
“What the fuck.” Sorrow glared at the phone, but Andi didn’t call back.
Andi’s accusation—suspicion, whatever it was—wasn’t anything Sorrow hadn’t been carrying for months already. It had been there at the back of her mind since that day in March when they had all surrounded her after the party, worried and angry and rightfully unsatisfied by her explanations. It had been there every time her father looked at her like he was afraid of what she would do next, and every time Sonia looked at her like she no longer recognized her. It had been there when she had told them both, ignoring the hurt and fear in their eyes, that the only way they could help was to let her leave.
Hands shaking, eyes stinging, Sorrow slipped her phone into her back pocket and pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes, willing the tears not to fall. She couldn’t stand here on the side of the road all day, but if she went back to the house now, with red eyes and a red face, she would look like she had been crying, and Verity would know something was wrong. Sorrow didn’t talk about her Florida family with her mother, not about fights and problems. It was simpler to keep her two families as separate as she could—or it had been, when there had been little reason for their jagged, ill-fitting edges to meet.